The way to do this on a systemd operating system such as CentOS 7 is to edit the font settings in the /etc/vconsole.conf file. These settings are applied by the systemd-vconsole-setup service, which is essentially a glorified way of running setfont and loadkeys before the login services are brought up.

So you would have FONT=sun12x22 in that file, for example.

Note that the service program allows kernel command-line options such as vconsole.font to override /etc/vconsole.conf contents. If you are mucking around with GRUB kernel command-line options, bear this in mind.

That works! I use ls /usr/lib/kbd/consolefonts | grep 32 to find a latarcyrheb-sun32 font. Then edit the /etc/vconsole.conf file to change FONT to this font. And also edit /usr/lib/systemd/system/systemd-vconsole-setup.service file, change After=sysinit.target and Before=shutdown.target, then reboot. Then the font has changed before login.
– EricOct 18 '17 at 9:55

The problem is that this approach changes the default font for all users.
– fpmurphyOct 18 '17 at 10:26